Microsoft announces the final release of Windows Live Essentials 2011:

We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! (Releasing in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if your language is not yet available, it will be very soon.) Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We’re also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we’ll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing.

I want to offer a special thank you to the millions of people who installed the beta! Our beta users helped us identify and address issues, with over two thousand forum posts and comments. In today’s release, we’ve addressed 95% of all bugs reported by beta users, leading to improvements that you’ll see across the suite.

Download it today!

Get started and download Windows Live Essentials 2011 today. It is being released in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if you don’t see it in your language yet, you should see it very soon. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7 on your PC, make sure you have the latest Windows updates installed before you install Windows Live Essentials (see the system requirements here). If your computer is still running Windows XP, you can, of course, continue to use the current Windows Live Essentials software, and then switch to Windows Live Essentials 2011 when you buy a new PC or upgrade to Windows 7.